LX.— SEA-SIDE SANDWORT-SPURREY. 
A/sine marina Wahlenberg. 
HE extensive and well-defined Family Caryophyllace * , which may be termed 
the Pink Family, although cosmopolitan, is mainly represented in Arctic 
latitudes, alpine altitudes, or in Europe and Western Asia. No members of the 
Family are put to much use ; but many of them with showy blossoms, mostly 
red or white, are favourite garden flowers, such as the Carnations, Sweet Williams, 
and Campions. They are mostly herbaceous, although occasionally their stems 
become woody below ; and swollen joints or nodes are as characteristic as in 
Polygonace*. The leaves are in opposite pairs, simple, and usually entire, and stipules 
may or may not be present. The branching is strikingly cymose, the main axis 
ending in the first flower, and one or two lateral branches springing from the axils of 
the pair of leaves below it and ending in their turn in flowers, and so on. The 
flowers are generally polysymmetric, complete, perfect, and pentamerous, with five 
free or united sepals, five petals, often notched or bifid, ten stamens and from two to 
five carpels united into a superior one-chambered ovary, with more or less separate 
styles and numerous ovules on a free central placenta. The ovules are usually 
campylotropous ; and the fruit is a capsule opening by valves or by teeth at its apex, 
the number of these being either equal to or double that of the styles. As the ripe 
fruits generally stand erect, only a few seeds at a time are shaken out of them as 
their dead stalks sway in the wind. This “censer-action,” as it is called, is a great 
economy of seed. 
Most, if not all, of the species secrete honey at the base of their stamens : most 
of them are protandrous, and are adapted to insect-pollination ; but in many small- 
flowered forms homogamy and self-pollination occur. 
The Family is divisible, both morphologically and biologically, into two Sub- 
Families, one obviously a lower type of organisation than the other, the Alsinoide* 
and the Silenoide*. In the former the sepals are free : in the latter they are united in 
a calyx-tube ; as a result of which structural character the honey is in the former 
accessible to short-tongued insects ; but in the latter only to the long-tongued bees 
and Lepidoptera. 
The Alsinoide* have mostly white, small flowers and ten stamens ; but the 
inner whorl may be missing, or some flowers may be entirely carpellate, those on 
other individuals being perfect, a condition known as gynodi*cism. Whilst most 
Caryophyllace* have sessile leaves with bases broad enough to protect the young 
axillary buds and have, therefore, no stipules, the Alsinoide* fall into two sections or 
Tribes, the Spergule * and the Alsine*, of which the former has narrow leaves and 
membranous stipules. 
In dealing with the Alsinoidece there has been a considerable confusion of names, 
